Sometimes the drops of air laugh at our impudent chuckle

and gather themselves into a breath. Sometimes

when the robin stares too long at the kitchen window,

we become her careless dream. Sometimes

the patches of nothing between the rain

know something, too, of waiting. Sometimes

I pinch myself asleep long enough to awaken again

to the resurrection of your scent. Sometimes

the sucking sound when pulling boots up from the mud 
is how I hear your leaving. Sometimes

the one goose not in formation with the others, 
heading where life goes are my thoughts without you. Sometimes

like old leaves pasted back on the living tree 
is the sound of my cracked voice next to your song. Sometimes

 
like a shower in the lobby with the door open 
is our talk. Sometimes

in the wordless poetry, alone,

is our silence.

For my wife on Valentine’s Day (insert goofy emoticon here_______).

Something indefinite defines you whenever the sun shivers. 

It speaks in whispers, whittling down uptown talk to you and me.

Leave the world alone I say, with its backdraft of naysayers,

too pale to know they are shadows.

Sometimes it’s okay to let the clock shrug off its own anxieties –

it disarms the passing minutes while the sky changes.

 The breeze pins hair to cheek and, with collars turned up,

we become convinced of our own slow presence.

Let’s just lisp whatever poetry stumbles out of our footsteps,

finding their rhythm on this uneven road.

Like a head, severed and featureless,

are those times too far from your scent.

Like limbs reattached, sutured to the blood,

is your silhouette in the doorway.

Like the dream after the waking,

is the smile of your skin.

Like the hours of insistence, drenched in purple,

is the declaration of your place.

Like a fish, drowning and drunk on its own world,

is the yes at the end of your fingers.

Like a poor man’s breakfast, waiting and ravished

is the moistness of your remembrance.

Like secrets in a barrel, floating high up to grasp,

is the welcome in your eyes.

Like turns in the park, the yielded path unknowing,

is the sound of our falling steps, together, sighing. 

For Rae, my wife of nearly 27 years.

In those moments most resigned

to their own solemnity, another’s lips

sip the freeing drafts of good, and are

once again wetted with a taste of new days.

I won’t just topple from this

tower of precarious teetering

when someone else is waiting

to drink what remains of

cold and distant promises.

Instead, you scope out my limits

and find them insufficient

to hold all that has yet to come. Trickle

becomes flow

becomes gush.

And I become.

O dear page, waiting and empty,

could there be a day better suited

to the recollections of a soul, overripe and

forgetting its light? Those things that once were

a willing fountain of refreshment have become

the sublimations of tired whimsy.

Sparrows only frolic where there is the bidding

of happy water, the promise of baptismal song;

the welcome of Maundy-feet in shared coolness.

When pools freeze over they are

fit for nothing more than a crystalline table

for airborne detritus, the gleanings of

the woeful. It mirrors itself, parody of warmer times,

more reflective but less refreshing.

Let no more the satisfactions otherwise suitable

to the salubrious spirit be hidden among

mournful weeds of forgotten bounty.

Rich the soil into which dreams are buried.

Light the step of the grace begotten.

Still are the waves of the undying.

Yet we call this to mind and

therefore have we hope…

Photo by Stephen Elliott

It was a moment, pulled taut

against an aching clock.

Oh, the smoothness of dairy speech

thrown long upon its patience, losing.

Forever in a cup, glances placed

softly on fingerprinted skin.

Eyes, twinned and pinned like

fridge magnet promises, align.

Whatever passed as ancient minutes

lumbered through their cast-iron fog

until they gave up waiting –

and removed their shoes.

Picture found here

Sometimes when the wind shifts

and the denouement of the drive

awakens us to other roads left

unexplored, a kind of sadness 

descends on the journey. This one

road upon which the gravitas of

grace spreads out long and lavish,

leads to lost places;

corridors of corruption,

alleyways of dreams,

aborted or forgotten, lanes of

loneliness, streams of sadness.

In their ditches of dread we find them,

hiding from the obvious, oblivious

to all that lay before them. Some

roads only appeared once they were

needed but quickly disappeared once

taken. It is then we kick

open the passenger door, deeply

dented and dusty from the drive, and

offer sojourn-solace on

the back roads of heaven.

Photo taken by me on a back roads trip in Washington State, October 2014